Kavanagh hangs up his wig

With the final demise of Kavanagh QC (ITV), can John Thaw expect to make many more reappearances as the gruff but sympathetic conscience of Middle England? The reinvention of Thaw via Inspector Morse has been one of the more memorable metamorphoses in TV history, erasing previous perceptions of him as the foul-mouthed, bare-knuckled star of Redcap or The Sweeney. With Kavanagh, a QC quaintly obsessed with using the incomplete and incomprehensible jigsaw of the law to obtain justice, it was as if Thaw was doing penance for 30 years of bent, brutal and bloody-minded TV coppers.

This probably isn't a bad time for Kavanagh to hang up his wig. Its sprawling peak-time slot was in danger of becoming a cliche, a home for risible Morse-clones like A Touch Of Frost or The Midsomer Murders, and a catch-all for assorted variations on the 'quality drama' theme. It sometimes looks as if television has swallowed its own glib shorthand, and automatically believes that anything which is shot on film, features sunlit rural locations, lasts 30 minutes too long and drops in quotes from Shakespeare is self-evidently of a higher order than a soap or a game show.

Although handicapped by the melodramatic title of End Games, the final Kavanagh was a skilfully wrought specimen. The dangling threads of the series's personal and professional themes were deftly woven together by writer Stephen Churchett, and the show's pervasive air of time slowly winding down and the inevitability of creeping age and disappointment was kept subtly in play. Nor was Kavanagh - his affair with Eleanor Harker already jeopardised by her departure for an interminable war crimes trial in The Hague - allowed to gallop off into his new future as head of the River Court chambers adorned with fresh courtroom laurels. His bid to free the wrongly-convicted Jimmy Cracken foundered in the murk of the legal profession's impenetrable old boy network. 'Why can't we put things right when we've got them wrong?', Kavanagh lamented desperately.

This setback was given a further painful twist when Kavanagh's River Court partner, the preposterous yet conniving Jeremy Aldermarten, successfully freed another prisoner convicted in the same case, although Aldermarten's triumph was undercut by our knowledge that he had freed a guilty man. He was dealt a more telling blow when the dithering Kavanagh finally decided to accept the top job at River Court. The practice's faithful clerk, Tom Buckley, set off down the corridor in a war-dance of glee when he heard the news. Aldermarten emerged from his office, was almost trampled over by the delighted Buckley, and his face instantly registered the understanding that he had been beaten to the top job.

The gap where Kavanagh QC used to be will doubtless be filled with even more cheap and contemptible copycat programming. Have we had a docusoap yet about what goes on in a TV commissioning editor's office, for example? Particularly to be dreaded are yet more brain-dead dribblings from the home improvement sector, as if Changing Rooms, that thing with Carol Vorderman in it and something called To DIY For weren't already too much of something that died at birth.

Inexplicably, Cutting Edge (C4) stuck its home-made oar into this overcrowded swamp last night with DIWhy?, a shapeless piece of work which randomly selected a handful of DIY fetishists and tried to probe into the motivation behind their addiction. Few things make less interesting television than watching people saw up pieces of wood or screw things onto other things, but there were endless sequences depicting exactly this.

There were unconvincing attempts to fashion sociological theses to 'explain' mankind's urge to put up shelves or assemble window boxes. 'DIY's like having a child,' suggested hardware store owner David Cohen idiotically. Gerald, a lachrymose Welshman with a hangdog expression, found solace for his inability to form relationships in building his own pickup truck.

If there was anything resembling a unifying theme, it was the predictable one that DIY is a substitute for doing something more interesting, though inadequate males might have taken inspiration from Marjan Debevere, a Belgian-born model who has swapped a life of glamour for an infatuation with home improvement.

'I would love a Black & Decker Workmate!' she confided. Gerald, this could be your lucky day.

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